The dean.

• Author: Pollak, Louis H.
• Position: Eugene V. Rostow, Yale Law School - Testimonial

In remembering Eugene Victor Rostow--"Gene," "E.V.R."--we take stock of a life well lived. Were Gene to read the several tributes in this issue of The Yale Law Journal, he would, in his smiling, upbeat way, be profoundly gratified by the affection and admiration that are their common themes. He would also, however, qualify his expression of gratification with the gentle admonition that we all should be cautious in treating as true whatever kind things might be said by any of the tribute writers. "Lapidary inscriptions," Gene was wont to remark, "are not under oath." But given that there were to be memorial tributes, Gene would have been glad, I am confident, that the vehicle of publication was this journal, a publication dear to his heart, and one that has for more than a century carried the banner of Yale--the University that was Gene's intellectual home for some four decades and whose Law School he led to greatness in his ten years as dean.

Why am I so confident that if tributes were to be had, an academic periodical would have been Gene's chosen venue? To respond, I must invoke a memory of Gene--one of five memories that I will share with you this afternoon because, for me, they define our friend. This memory goes back approximately forty years. The Law School was hosting a lecturer of uncommon distinction, Philip Jessup, the eminent scholar of international law who, toward the end of the Truman years, was hijacked from Columbia Law School by President Truman and Secretary Acheson to serve in lofty diplomatic posts, including Ambassador-at-Large. By the time of his visit to the Law School in the early 1960s, Jessup had become Judge Jessup of the International Court of Justice. The evening before Jessup was to deliver his lecture, Edna and Gene had an elegant dinner party at their beautiful home on St. Ronan Street. In the course of the evening, Gene put a question to Jessup. Gene asked how Jessup would like to be introduced the next day: "As 'Judge'? As 'Ambassador'? Or," Gene persisted, "by your highest title, 'Professor'?"

Gene was a professor--a recently minted full professor--at the time of my earliest memory of him. The year was 1946, and we first-years were invited to a meeting convened by second- and third-years who were the incumbent high priests of an obscure but manifestly influential divinity--the self-same Yale Law Journal in which these tributes today appear. The purpose of the meeting was to explain the trials of Hercules one had to go through to become a votary of the sacred Yale Law Journal flame. The explainer was to be Professor Rostow, of whom we first-years had a considerable amount of advance intelligence. We knew that as an undergraduate he had been captain of Yale's water polo team. And we knew that as a law student he had been the highest of the...